Staff downsizing of St. Johnsbury Athenaeum raises furor

Feb. 18, 2013

Stephen Garfield of St. Johnsbury, a self-described longtime patron, uses the computer in a reading room at the library at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, Wednesday. On the wall behind him is a portrait of Horace Fairbanks, the library's founder. / GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS

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Free Press Staff Writer

The St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, Art Gallery and Free Public Library, on Wednesday. / GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS

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When the 11-member staff of the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum was summoned to a meeting on Monday, afternoon, Dec. 3, they knew something was afoot, but they couldn’t be sure what. It was only afterward that some of them started calling that day “Bloody Monday.”

They closed the library early that day, at 2:30 p.m. The meeting was at 3 in the Athenaeum Hall, on the second floor, an elegant, high-ceilinged room that contains part of the institution’s celebrated art collection. The staff sat in a circle for a presentation by two board members and the Athenaeum’s executive director.

The staffers were told that their jobs were being terminated as part of an institutional restructuring and that they could apply for any of several new positions that would begin Feb. 1. They were each handed a packet that included legal documents and information about their severance packages.

“Everybody was stunned and kind of in shock,” said Lisa von Kann, who had served as library director for most of her two decades at the Athenaeum. “This was something we hadn’t conceived of.”

Equally surprised were members of the community and patrons of the Athenaeum, an incorporated nonprofit institution that receives an annual appropriation from St. Johnsbury and that serves as a public, regional library. A protest demonstration, “Hug the Library,” drew more than 200 people to encircle the building in January, and an impromptu group, Neighbors in Support of the Athenaeum Staff, emerged to raise questions about the personnel changes at a public forum Feb. 2 attended by more than 40 people.

The restructuring and staff reduction were prompted by longstanding financial problems and a self-imposed mandate by the board to balance the Athenaeum’s budget by 2015, said Bill Marshall, chairman of the Athenaeum’s 12-member board. The changes, he said, seek to revitalize the library’s programs and services in the face of new technological and digital challenges.

“The Athenaeum is more than a library,” Marshall said. “It’s a national historic landmark. It’s also home for a significant collection of 19th-century paintings.”

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The key is to establish a sound financial footing for the institution, which has been obliged over the last decade to draw excessively from its endowment to meet expenses, Marshall said. Budget deficits over the last few years have been in the $200,000 range, as high as $250,000, he said, and trustees have relied on endowment funds to make up the difference.

“We felt the Athenaeum is in jeopardy and it’s not sustainable to continue the level of drawing down the endowment,” he said.

Part of the financial remedy trustees devised, Marshall said, was to cut staff expenses.

A gift to the townspeople

The Athenaeum was intended by its builder, local manufacturer Horace Fairbanks, to serve as St. Johnsbury’s public library, with an initial book collection of 8,000 volumes. He made a gift of the building, of the French Second Empire style, in 1871. A gallery was added two years later to house an art collection, including landscapes by American painters, of which “The Domes of Yosemite” by Albert Bierstadt is among the best known.

Fairbanks did not provide an endowment, Marshall said. Rather, that fund has been raised over the years through gifts and estate bequests. The market value of the endowment took a hit in 2008, amid the U.S. financial crisis, and now stands at about $2 million. Over the last decade, an average of 15.4 percent of the value has been withdrawn annually to fill budget deficits, he said, a practice that trustees have realized cannot continue. (The preferred annual withdrawal rate had been 5 percent.)

Marshall pointed out that major capital projects — replacing a historic skylight at a cost of $750,000, upgrading windows to historic-preservation standards — were paid for by separate fundraising efforts, not from the endowment.

Incorporated as a 501(c)3 organization, like many of Vermont’s smaller libraries, the Athenaeum is governed by a self-perpetuating board of trustees. The board’s bimonthly meetings are not legally required to be open to the public and have not been.

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By contrast, municipal libraries are publicly governed, subject to the state’s open-meetings law, and heavily supported by public funds. Williston’s Dorothy Alling Memorial Library, for example, received $58.64 per town resident in tax support in 2010-11, compared to $13.61 in St. Johnsbury. The Williston library received $529,727 in tax support that year, which largely covered total operating expenses of $535,333. The St. Johnsbury Athenaeum received $103,500 in local tax support, less than a fifth of the total operating expenses of $582,121. The deficit that year exceeded $200,000.

Marshall said the board looked at financial profiles of libraries in towns of similar size and found the Athenaeum to be high in cost per capita and low in the degree of local tax support. Asked what other libraries are considered “comparable,” he cited Middlebury, Newport, Springfield and Williston.

Von Kann said she had attended board meetings regularly as library director or head librarian, and that while she was aware of the Athenaeum’s financial difficulties as discussed over the years, she never heard any discussion among trustees of the impending personnel makeover, which she said came as “a complete surprise.” Library staff were not consulted about the restructuring, she said.

Her position as head librarian was eliminated in the new configuration. She chose not to apply for one of the two new full-time librarian jobs. She said she had planned to retire later in 2013.

“In all honesty, for me, this experience has been like a knife through the heart,” von Kann said this month , “creating a wound so deep, it will take a very long time to heal. I dearly hope this is not the same for the Athenaeum, a place so loved by so many.”

Indeed, the handling of the mass layoffs and the dismissal of von Kann, as well as the longtime children’s librarian, fueled the public outcry.

“She was such an asset,” said Margaret Ryan, one of the Neighbors in Support of the Athenaeum Staff group, about von Kann. “We all knew there was a financial problem, but you don’t throw out the most valuable person in the library, very educated, very qualified.”

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“There was no complaint of incompetence,” said Lynn Wurzburg, co-president of Friends of the Athenaeum, which supports fundraising and volunteer work. “People feel a big loss, of familiarity and continuity of the library.”

New configuration

The board’s restructuring downsized the library staff from eight positions (three full-time and five part-time), which amounted to 4.9 full-time-equivalents, to four positions (two full-time, one three-quarter time and one half-time), or 3.25 full-time equivalents.

In addition, two part-time paid positions for docents were eliminated, as was an information technology position, to be contracted out. The docent positions will be filled by volunteers

Three of the previous library staffers have been rehired — as librarian and associate librarian, and as full-time curator, a new position. A development position was upgraded to full-time. All Athenaeum staff answer to Matt Powers, executive director, who has held that position since 2010.

A youth services librarian with a Master of Library Science degree has been hired more recently, as has a second full-time librarian.

Some patrons apparently have their doubts about how the new arrangement will work.

“We don’t understand how the library is going to function like it did with a reduced staff,” Wurzburg said.

At the public forum Feb. 2, one of the questions raised was whether any library services would be affected by the changes. When the question was put to Marshall in a phone interview, he replied:

“They will be affected in a very positive way.” The expectation, he said, is that library services will be “revitalized and enhanced.”

The trustees’ vision also includes stepped-up collaborations with other institutions — including St. Johnsbury’s other high-profile nonprofits, including the Academy, the Fairbanks Museum and Catamount Arts; more emphasis on making the Athenaeum a community gathering place; digitizing rare books and providing access to super broadband.

The restructuring is intended, Marshall said in an email, to “realign the Athenaeum’s services to adapt to the changing ways information is accessed,” to “strengthen the educational value” of the arts and rare books collection by establishing the curator’s position, and to “create a simpler, flat management organization.” The overall staff reduction, he said was “less than one person” — .825 full-time-equivalent.

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The public interface

The trustees were invited to the Neighbors’ public forum Feb. 2 but did not attend. In a letter to the organizers, Marshall stated that the board had explained its actions and its challenges to the community over the past few weeks.

“We share the priority stated in your petition of January 12, 2013: ‘to continue providing maximum library services for the good of the public.’ This priority, among others, guides us now and into the future,” Marshall wrote.

“While we appreciate your concerns, the implementation of the reorganization is under way. A meeting to discuss forestalling our plans would not be productive; therefore, we respectfully decline your invitation.”

In Wurzburg’s view, the public outcry resulted partly from a perception that the board is a closed body that plans and implements without public input.

Asked if the trustees would consider opening their meetings to the public, Marshall said he expects the board will discuss that.

Martha Reid, state librarian, said that even though the board meetings of incorported libraries aren’t legally required to be open to the public, the Vermont Library Department includes that among its minimum standards.

“Our interest is in having them serve the St. Johnsbury community,” she said of the Athenaeum trustees. “It would serve them well to be more transparent with the community. Any library that receives public funds — I really support that library being as transparent as possible.” She added that she has conveyed to the board her “dismay” at how the layoffs were handled.

Theresa Del Pozzo, of the Neighbors group, said the Athenaeum’s restructuring will be a topic at town meeting. The proposed town appropriation for 2013 is $115,000. That and other fiscal matters could be up for discussion at the informational budget meeting that precedes Australian balloting on the town’s annual spending plan.

“(W)ithout public oversight or disclosure of their finances there are many people who will object to any additional funding,” she wrote in an email. “The public has a right to know, in specific dollar amounts: how much is the shortfall, what are the costs of the new administrative staff they are hiring...”

“In order to rectify the problem, the Board will have to answer the public’s demands for full disclosure,” she said.

Powers said he believes some of the Athenaeum’s financial records could be made public through a “deliberate process.”

In transitioning to new staff, Powers said, the Athenaeum has sought to move beyond the personnel controversy.

“We want to heal some wounds, make amends,” he said. “As we move forward, where we are right now, the staff is trying hard to make this work.”